In a public meeting with NASA’s chief, the agency’s top scientists have said that they expect to find alien life within the next 20 years. Unfortunately, for those hoping that Europa or Mars might harbor life, NASA is fairly confident that the discovery of extraterrestrials will probably be outside our Solar System rather than within it. But still, suffice it to say, the discovery of life of any kind outside of Earth’s atmosphere would be massive news. Within 20 years, we could finally find out that we’re not alone in the universe — and, well, that would change everything.

The universe, as you probably know, is almost impossibly large. It is almost 100 billion light years across and consists of of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars. The latest estimate is that there are up to 50 sextillion potentially habitable planets in the universe. Now it’s time to go one step further, though: The scientific community is preparing to launch a bevy of new space telescopes that can peer across the universe and tell us how many of those planets actually harbor life.

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